


Sunrise

by tabrisin



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-05 16:40:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18832549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tabrisin/pseuds/tabrisin
Summary: A small vignette from the travels of the few Ferelden Grey Wardens during the Fifth Blight.





	Sunrise

**Author's Note:**

> my canon has multiple wardens in it - Mahariel, Tabris, and Cousland. my Tabris is the Hero of Ferelden. this story features Athena Tabris and Enavuna Mahariel.

Athena clambered out of her tent, and was surprised to see that the flames from the campfire hadn’t been snuffed out. Vuna knelt near it, facing away from Athena and wrapped in a blanket. She turned to smile at Athena as she approached, but the dark circles beneath her eyes betrayed her true weariness.

“Nightmares?” Vuna asked. It was more of a statement than a question, and Athena simply nodded in response while taking a seat beside her. None of the few Grey Wardens in their camp wished to dwell on the horrors that plagued their slumber.

They sat in silence for a while. The night was chilly but pleasant for Ferelden, and the forest that surrounded them was beautiful and serene. The group had made camp a short distance from the Dalish clan they had been trying to convince to join the Wardens’ cause. It had been….successful. There had been a thousand-year-old elf orchestrating an ancient werewolf curse that had come back to haunt him, but Athena and friends had managed to avoid a bloody catastrophe.

Vuna had been in odd sorts during their time with the Dalish. She was typically the most boisterous of their motley crew, and Athena counted on her (and Alistair) to help lift the doom and gloom of the Blight. However, in the past few days she had been noticeably more subdued, despite the long list of antics they had endured to even reach the Dalish encampment in the first place.

Athena considered her words carefully before attempting to comfort her friend. Despite them being two-thirds of the elves within their company, Athena’s city elf status left her feeling divided from Vuna’s Dalish...ness. Vuna had never made her feel inferior, nor did Athena hold any resentment towards her for being Dalish, but…. Athena’s relationship with the Dalish as a whole was complex. As, she supposed, was Vuna’s. But, Athena thought, her friend’s comfort was more important to her than any cultural awkwardness between them.

So, Athena broke the silence: “Vuna, are you okay?” Her voice was soft, and she turned to face her friend as she spoke.

Vuna looked to her, an eyebrow raised. “How d’you mean?” Her typical Dalish accent made the words tumble off of her tongue.

“You’ve just seemed very quiet since we got here,” Athena paused, “I want to make sure you’re feeling alright.”

Vuna opened her mouth to respond, and then closed it, her expression still clearly one of confusion. For a moment, Athena wondered if that was the right way to phrase her concern. 

Then, Vuna offered a small smile. “Yeah, I - sorry, I guess I’m just feeling a wee bit homesick. This clan is smaller than mine, but they are...they’re very similar.”

“Oh,” said Athena. Obviously.

Vuna giggled at that. “It’s very sweet for you to ask that, I appreciate it,” she said, almost apologetically.

Athena gave her a smile of her own, but said nothing. Silence washed over them once again, but Athena barely noticed it. She turning something over in her mind.

“What’s the name of your clan?” she asked, after a moment.

“Sabrae,” Vuna answered immediately. A shadow seemed to pass over her face as she said the word, but Athena pretended it was just the fire throwing swaths of light against them as it danced.

“Sabrae,” Athena repeated. “That’s very pretty.”

Vuna laughed again, louder this time. Athena was glad to hear it: she had missed Vuna’s clear and honest laugh.

“What?” Athena exclaimed, faking indignance. “It is! Just like your name, Enavuna.” She pronounced her friend’s full name carefully, not wanting to mispronounce it, as she had only heard it once before at Ostagar, which seemed like a million ages ago.

Vuna stuck out her tongue - she thought the name too fancy for her.

It occurred to Athena that she had never asked what her name meant, so she did: “What does it mean?”

Vuna grimaced. “Sunrise,” she said. “Apparently I was born with the sun, so now I’m called ‘sunrise’. Yuck.” She paused, and a look of realization came onto her pale face. “You don’t know any elven, do you?”

Athena shrugged, casting her gaze down to the tips of her socks. “Besides ‘shem’, not really. Not many Dalish around Denerim to teach me.”

“But no one in the alienage…?” Vuna trailed off. She knew the answer to that question.

No. There were none in the alienage who spoke more than a word of elven. Athena poked at the dirt near her feet with a surprising ferocity. She had never met a Dalish before Vuna, and had known little of them besides the rumours that had traveled about the alienage. When she was little, she had hated them. Hated them for running off into the forest and telling magic stories, while she had watched her mother be slaughtered and her baby sister be stolen away. Thankfully, she had since aimed that anger at those who truly deserved it.

But the anger surrounding the Dalish remained, to an extent. She was not angry with the Dalish, per say. She was angry over the language that they had hidden away and that she had never had even a chance to learn. She was angry over those damned facial tattoos they displayed with pride, but that were meaningless to all besides them. She was angry over the fact that they were connected to being elven in a way that Athena could never understand. Anger was not an emotion that Athena ever enjoyed feeling, but it had wormed its way into the parts of her soul that felt she was missing something important, something that she should know but that she had foolishly forgotten.

“How do you say hello?” Athena asked. “In elven, I mean.”

Vuna tilted her head slightly before replying, “Andaran atish’an, or aneth ara if you’re being casual.”

Athena tried to repeat the greetings, but the words felt foreign in her mouth and sounded strange without Vuna’s beautiful accent.  
But she continued to ask for simple phrases in elven, unknowingly testing Vuna on the lessons she had paid little attention to in her adolescence. She repeated them over and over, first out loud and then again and again in her mind, desperately trying to commit them to memory.

She barely even noticed when the sun rose.


End file.
